Month: December 2016

Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome has a chapter on psychotherapy that completely contradicts my experience of psychotherapy. This is a continuation of a book review that started in an earlier post. There, I take issue with Attwood’s positions on honesty and special interests. Here, I take issue with his advice that psychoanalytic…

I’m reading Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. That and Neurotribes seemed like logical first steps after re-framing my problem as “autism,” or adding autism to the list of problems. The stuff on playground social dynamics makes the book worth reading. There was food for thought about gender development and why I developed…

The singing while she looks for a journal entry lasts about 5 minutes, if you want to skip that part. I had all of that, minus the auditory hallucinations, losing time, and panic attacks. I’m sure our experiences were a LOT the same, because it’s a cult and everything your parents tell you is scripted…

This YouTube video was interesting to me, as someone with a Jehovah’s Witness upbringing: The first thing that stood out is that I have the same neurosis about making too much noise in my apartment. Relating everything back to autism issues, another thing that jumps out is the way she explains how having 10 million…

Two interesting ideas are new to me: my whole family might be on the autistic spectrum, and there might be something uniquely autistic about skateboarding culture. After spending most of the holiday weekend inside thinking about autism by myself, I went to the skatepark yesterday. The whole outing turned out to be stressful. Why? Sensory…

Sometimes I just want to relax and listen to house music: Can’t go wrong with David Attenborough set to deep house. Except that, around 1:15, it starts showing a bunch of black people. Like, 10 seconds after showing chimpanzees. Some of them are dancing, because everybody knows black people love dancing, the way cows moo…

While thinking about whether or not I’m autistic, I realized you could describe skateboarding as a form of “stimming.” I’ve always felt there was something really special and helpful about skateboarding, but it’s new to think of it in the context of autism. The first thing I found when I started checking the internet was…